{"id":11095,"date":"2013-03-20T14:36:08","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T18:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=11095"},"modified":"2013-03-20T14:36:08","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T18:36:08","slug":"bloggers-remember-what-they-wrote-when-the-iraq-war-started","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=11095","title":{"rendered":"bloggers remember what they wrote when the Iraq war started"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Blogging was still pretty new in March 2003, but I was already at it. This week, on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, veteran bloggers have been reviewing their own opinions when it started. (See, e.g., contrasting posts by <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intelligencer\/2013\/03\/iraq-what-i-got-wrong-and-what-i-still-believe.html\">Jonathan Chait<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2013\/03\/why-we-wont-learn-from-iraq\/274140\/\">James Fallows<\/a>). Reflection is a valuable activity because we ought to learn from mistakes. I don&#8217;t find a strong statement for or against the invasion on my blog, probably because I was a bit conflicted&#8211;and also, I rarely opine on anything unless I think my professional work gives me a comparative advantage that I ought to share. But I did <a href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4169\">post this on March 31, 2003<\/a>, and it brings back vivid memories:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We\u2019re back from a week in Greece. This is a civic\/political blog, not a personal diary, so I will refrain from describing our many adventures. I can, however, file a report on how the current war looks from Greece. A few vignettes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We\u2019re staying in the medieval walled village of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.islandstrolling.com\/islands\/cyclades\/sifnos\/english\/kastro.htm\">Kastro<\/a>, on the island of Siphnos\u2014at the opposite side of the island from the port. It would seem to be a remote and isolated spot (especially during the off-season, with all ferries cancelled because of gale-force winds), far from the world and its troubles. But when we go upstairs to answer the phone in our landlords\u2019 apartment one morning, the whole family is weeping (quite literally) at al-Jazeera\u2019s coverage of the first marketplace bombing in Baghdad. The father clutches his chest and says, \u201cMy heart is black, black. Bush\u2014this all for money.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>A repeated scene, replayed in every taverna, coffee shop, ferryboat lounge, and hotel lobby we enter. A TV is on in the corner showing the al-Jazeera feed from Baghdad with Greek commentary that we can\u2019t read, while Greeks, wreathed in cigarette smoke, sit watching and forming their opinions. These TV\u2019s are often our only source of news, so we peer at the Greek text for clues about what is happening one time zone to the east, conscious all the time that everyone knows we are Americans.<\/li>\n<li>Eating ice cream at the elegant cafe atop Lykavittos Hill, overlooking the Parthenon and hundreds of thousands of Greeks who are marching from Parliament toward the U.S. Embassy. We\u2019ve picked this spot, in part, because we\u2019re responsible for two kids whom we want to keep away from any rioting, and we don\u2019t think that the marchers will possibly try to ascend Lykavittos. Chants, unintelligible to us, float up from the Athens streets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And now we\u2019re back. Time always seems to slow while you travel, or expand like a fan with all the details of each day still clear in your mind. It seems forever since you left your usual life. And then you return to your routine, and the fan snaps closed. You feel that you were gone for just a dimly remembered day or two.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blogging was still pretty new in March 2003, but I was already at it. This week, on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, veteran bloggers have been reviewing their own opinions when it started. (See, e.g., contrasting posts by Jonathan Chait and James Fallows). Reflection is a valuable activity because we ought to learn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq-and-democratic-theory","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11095"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11099,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11095\/revisions\/11099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}